Contrasts between Human and Machine Vision: Should Technology Recapitulate Phylogeny?

Abstract

Biological evolution has imposed constraints on the development of the human visual system that do not necessarily apply to machine vision. Three characteristics of human vision illustrate the effects of these special constraints: the primacy of depth perception, the coexistence of perception and contradictory knowledge, and the use of heuristic perceptual processes. One approach that includes a consideration of biological constraints is ecological optics, but the usefulness of that approach is limited by its failure to consider perceptual processes or mechanisms and to deal with conditions of marginal stimulus information. Because of the special constraints imposed by evolution, the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of a perceptual process in a computational system is not evidence for its presence or absence in human vision. An appreciation of the differences between human and machine vision should facilitate research on problems common to the two fields.